Ingela Bohm's Blog, page 55

The daily life of a devil’s advocate

Every time I publish a blog post, I bite my nails.

My problem is the fear that people will disagree with what I write – which is absolutely inevitable and shouldn’t be a problem at all. But it is for me. I’m scared of offending people, at the same time that I have a tendency to see the opposite side of every argument. Sometimes I even argue against issues I hold dear, just to leave no stone unturned.

I’m actually a little ashamed of my philosophical nature. It can feel like a useless trait. Countless times, people have told me not to “think too much” or not to “be over-sensitive”. But I don’t think this world needs more people who think too little, or who are insensitive.

All this has made me a pressure cooker. I always keep silent, always censor myself, and never say what’s on my mind. It may seem ridiculous to an outsider, but I once terminated a blog account because I’d offended a follower – kind of like the cyber equivalent of being swallowed by the earth.

But I can’t go on like that. I have to speak somewhere, even if what I have to say may not be popular. That’s why I’m writing it down in this blog, in longer, reasoning texts where more than one side of an issue can be explored. That way, I can at least bring order to my thoughts before I set them lose on the world.

The thing is, I’m cursed with the “on the other hand” syndrome. Astrologers may point to the considerable influence of Libra and Sagittarius in my birth chart; MBTI experts may quote my type (INTP) as the reason; maybe I’m just the result of an upbringing where I was often told to see things from someone else’s perspective. I don’t know, but the older I get, the more I question everything, including myself. Even when I don’t have an actual antagonist, I play the devil’s advocate, and for every opinion I have, there’s an internal dissident who begs to differ.

When I try to verbalize these opposing voices, it often comes out garbled and, paradoxically, one-sided. I tend to react with anger to opinions I otherwise defend, just because I have this overwhelming urge to consider both sides of the issue. If that sounds half crazy and absolutely exhausting, let me tell you it is. I live with constant cognitive dissonance. Add to this that I easily lose my train of thought when someone disagrees with me, interrupts or questions what I say. I’m so conditioned to consider opposing views that I may come off as a complete turncoat.

Still, I may have a role to play, even if I’m terrified of playing it: the questioning, weighing, critical role. I don’t particularly like that trait in myself, and yet I find myself searching for it in others. So I guess this post is my apology for any ruffled feathers – but apologizing is more or less pointless, since I’m not planning on mending my ways. What I’m really saying is, if you disagree with me on something, you may very well be right.

If indeed there is such a thing as “right”.

The Holmes/Watson fanfic that changed my life

Today, I’d just like to take the opportunity to pay homage to one of the people who set me on the path I’m travelling today: Katie Forsythe, writer of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction.

Katie, I have no idea who you are, but yours was the first fanfic I read, and I loved it to bits. You’re the reason why I’m writing in the M/M genre, and I’m grateful to you for providing something beautiful to be my first taste of it. If I’d read something else, something less well written, I might have been put off the whole idea.

Also, angst!

To everyone else: enjoy!

Being gay in Elizabethan times

In sixteenth century England, sodomy was a capital offence, but maybe not for the reasons we think. It wasn’t just about homosexual behaviour, but about sexual debauchery in general. It had nothing to do with who you were (there was no such thing as “a homosexual” then), it was just something you did. Anal intercourse was a sin partly because it avoided conception and was only done for fun, no matter who you did it with.

For this reason, you could be hanged if you practised it, at least in theory. There aren’t many records of such executions, but this can have other reasons: records can burn or otherwise disappear. From what we can surmise, though, it seems the authorities mostly chose to look the other way. Maybe that’s understandable. I mean, if they had to hang every Tom, Dick and Francis who did something sexually questionable, they wouldn’t have the time to focus on the really important stuff like wars, would they?

Curiously though, they looked more sternly on the offence if you combined it with coining and atheism. To a 21st century person, this is completely baffling. What do sodomy, coining and atheism have to do with each other, after all?

Well, as this article and this book put forward, sodomy, like atheism, could be used as a symbol for antisocial behaviour in general. Also, funnily enough, coining and sodomy were viewed as two sides of, forgive the pun, the same coin. Lots of fascinating reasons are laid out in this article, but one aspect touches on the current view (of some!) that gay people somehow have an agenda to spread homosexuality to straight people. The Elizabethans believed that you could be “contaminated” by it, and that by practising sodomy, instead of creating children, you created new sodomites. If you also created fake money through coining, that was taken as further proof, because look, you’re making more of something bad, and it’s the same thing, right?

Right. In hindsight, many beliefs can look downright silly, but just try to view our own times with a future person’s eyes. Won’t they find a lot to laugh about?

Anyway, back to the sixteenth century. Poet Kit Marlowe was accused of sodomy, atheism and coining, and some believe that these are the things that led to his death. I won’t comment on that in this post, since it would completely ruin Rival Poet for you, should you ever wish to read it. I will say, however, that the accusations smack of truth. His poem Hero and Leander is nothing short of a gushy Leander fan letter, and Hero is described mostly through her clothes.

Exhibit A, Leander:

His body was as straight as Circe’s wand;

Jove might have sipt out nectar from his hand.

Even as delicious meat is to the taste,

So was his neck in touching, and surpast

The white of Pelops’ shoulder: I could tell ye,

How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly;

And whose immortal fingers did imprint

That heavenly path with many a curious dint

That runs along his back…

Okay, we get it. He was delicious enough to eat.

On to exhibit B, Hero:

The outside of her garments were of lawn,

The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn;

Her wide sleeves green, and border’d with a grove,

Where Venus in her naked glory strove

To please the careless and disdainful eyes

Of proud Adonis, that before her lies;

Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain,

Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.

No need to go on, we get the picture: Marlowe liked a bit of flair on a gal, but the gal herself? Barely there.

Another prominent person to be accused was Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. This guy, held by some to be the true author of Shakespeare’s works, was charged for raping his boy servants. Not just sodomy, then, but pederasty. Insert horrified gasp here. Our revered perhaps-Shakespeare, a child molester?

But wait a minute. The men who accused him may have had a bone to pick with the earl. It’s the old Michael Jackson conundrum: how can we ever guess the truth about an alleged crime committed by a rich and famous person when 1) the law tends to be lenient towards them just because they are rich and famous, and 2) people tend to accuse them of crimes in order to bring them down/and or get at their riches? Add to this that the crime in question happened more than four hundred years ago, and all we can do is speculate. In the end, Oxford was acquitted, but we can’t know why.

For my part, I chose to exploit this little historical nugget in Rival Poet. I’m not saying Oxford really did it, but I used it to add some tension to my plot and to strengthen one of my themes.

Also, as a devout Stratfordian, I guess I’m not above a little bitching…

Oh crap, it’s him!

Sometimes, I write about real people.

…

Okay, I always write about real people. All my characters have faces that actually belong to someone in the so called real world, but they’re camouflaged with so many layers of makeup that it should be impossible to recognize them.

For example, Kit Marlowe borrowed not only his face but a few (imagined) traits from a British singer, just because they actually resembled each other (based on the putative portrait of Marlowe). Once I’d connected the two men in my mind, it was kind of impossible to avoid borrowing a few other things, too. His charmingly mocking tone. His anger. His critical view of everything to do with politics.

I’ll be forever grateful. I might not have published anything at all if not for him.

But sometimes I end up in the same room as the people I write about. Last spring, I published a short story called Strings Attached. In it, a conductor and a violinist meet for a one-off concert in London, and their instant attraction becomes a problem as they head off again in the morning, each tied to his own international schedule. For these characters, I used two famous faces who shall remain unnamed. Suffice it to say that they’re extremely accomplished, and my writing that story was nothing short of fangirling.

Well, imagine my surprise when I went to a concert in my home town, and it turned out that “my” conductor was conducting it! We had really good seats, too, so I was sitting five yards behind the man for three hours, feeling weird and somehow visible in the darkness of the concert hall. Of course, he didn’t know about my short story, but still. It made me stop and think.

What if one of my borrowed faces did read “their” story and somehow saw themselves in it? How awful. Or what if someone close to them picks it up and makes the connection? What if someone else saw the resemblance between the Marlowe portrait and that singer, and decided to take offense?

Of course, the chances of that happening are infinitesimal, but as I said, it got me thinking. Ultimately, it gave birth to another story – this time a novel, Not Safe For Work. In it, I explore what would happen if the people who star in fanfic actually got to read it. How would their lives be impacted by untrue, sexy stories going viral? How would their friendship survive?

Main characters Jakob and Leo have been friends for ages, and they both think they know everything about each other. But when Jakob finds a blog filled with steamy fics about the two of them, his life is turned upside down. He starts to doubt everything – Leo, his friends, his colleagues, even his own heart. Hell, he even starts to question reality itself.

Not Safe For Work is my nightmare vision of a harmless phenomenon gone horribly wrong. It’s what would happen if the conductor at that concert stumbled on Strings Attached and thought “Hey… this sounds just like me.”

Then again, maybe I’d be doing him a favour. Maybe he and that cute violinist really should be together.

Which is what Jakob in Not Safe For Work slowly realizes…

Romance: a home for the homeless

Thinking that you’re alone can really wear you down. I know, it’s a cliché. It’s been said so many times that it’s petrified into something almost meaningless, and yet I need to say it once again, because every individual has to discover it for themselves. For a socially ostracized person who finally finds people who resemble them, it can never be a cliché. For them, it’s life-changing.

I still remember my shock when we took the MBTI personality test at work, and I was given my results. For the first time in my life, I realized that I didn’t need to look for a diagnosis to label myself. I didn’t have a mental illness, I just had a personality type that wasn’t very common, especially among women.

Needless to say, I became obsessed (because that’s how I process things – I devour them). I read up on my type and those of my loved ones, and the world around me settled in a new pattern, one that I could finally understand, just because I’d been given this key. Since then, I’ve doubted the MBTI many times, I’ve come across contradictory information that messed with my head, and I’ve retaken the test to ascertain that I’m not actually another type, but my interest in it hasn’t dwindled. That first feeling of “Wow, there are others like me!” doesn’t go away.

So I can identify with how other people need their special groups, how they need to meet people who speak their language. I know what it’s like to see that you’re not alone or somehow defective – because in a world that favours streamlining, it can be really hard to keep your self-esteem. It doesn’t matter how much you tell yourself that you’re okay, when everyone around you values something you’re not. Human beings are social animals, and most of us can’t afford to ignore what other people think of us. No matter how many Facebook memes we post, proudly declaring that we follow our hearts and to hell with everybody else, it’s difficult to go your own way when you have no one to keep you company.

Therefore, groups are important. But in the end, even among your peers, schisms inevitably happen. I too have experienced the disappointment of realizing that not even “your people” are always welcoming, inclusive or understanding. For example, an MBTI type isn’t the be-all and end-all of a person’s character. My own type, the INTP, is stereotyped as a socially awkward nerd who’s interested in natural science and machines, and many people feel at home in that stereotype.

I don’t. Sure, I’m a nerd, but I’m not incapable of understanding social norms. I’m just very critical of them and have a hard time pretending to be like everyone else. Because of this, for the longest time I doubted whether I could really be an INTP – I, who hated maths, was sentimental and sensitive, and went out of my way to be nice to people and avoid conflict. Over time, I understood that the stereotype was just there to guide people, to be an example of how this particular type manifested in actual behaviour.

In the same way, I suspect that a LGBTQIA person can be initially relieved to find their group, and then become bitterly disappointed as they realize that the other people in the group are not necessarily like them at all. Maybe they don’t even think you belong there, because you don’t have X or Y trait that’s suddenly mandatory because that’s a rule they just made up.

It hurts, and it’s okay to say it hurts. Even in an individualistic society, it is allowed to say, “I want to feel at home with other people. I want to belong. I need validation, and I sometimes grieve that I’m different.”

The feeling of not being at home even in your own group is a core idea that drives many of my stories. All my characters feel somewhat out of place in their families and/or home towns, and their quest is to find a new home, whether that be a band, a flock of vampires, or a company of players. Even so, they often find that their new home isn’t the perfect place they first believed it to be, but that’s where the romance comes in: all my characters find their ultimate home in another person – the only one they can be themselves with, the only one who sees.

For me, that’s the heart of the romance genre and the reason I write in it: the hope of a soul-mate, one single person in the whole wide world who understands. Someone who gives you a home, far away from where you were born.

Or, as Shakespeare said, “the marriage of true minds”.

A “useless” person’s ache to contribute

I think.

A lot.

I’m a thinker, apparently. :) That’s according to the MBTI personality type system, but you don’t really need psychobabble to see the obvious: I sit around and think. Sometimes I talk about what I think, but only to other people who enjoy it as a mere intellectual exercise. I’ve learnt to shut my trap among people who don’t.

So that’s my personality, the way I function. Some people call themselves doers, and I often wish I was more like them. It’s taken me a long time even to admit that I am a thinker, because it sounds so dreadfully boring and geeky. I’m still struggling to accept that thinking is all I have to contribute to the world.

Because that’s where the shoe pinches for me: I want to contribute. You might not guess it by looking at me. Most of the time, I’m quiet, alone, seemingly doing nothing. The mainstream image of contributing to society, at least where I live, is focused on manual labour and caretaking. If you don’t produce material goods, renovate or clean physical objects, or take care of people’s bodies, you don’t really do anything worthwhile. You’re just sitting around on your arse, letting others do the work for you while you daydream.

I’ve internalized this image. I don’t believe I contribute, not in my heart. I sometimes try to reason with myself, thusly: “All those manual labourers that you admire so much – what would they do without their wrench? And where did the wrench come from, if not from someone who sat around thinking, and finally had a great idea?” We wouldn’t have cars, or computers, or telephones, if nobody had the time to think. Everyone is needed. Every type can contribute.

It’s just that some contributions are so invisible. Someone who works with their hands has something to show for it at the end of the day, while thinkers, like Flaubert, may have “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it”. It’s easy to feel useless when that’s what you do. It’s easy to despair of your ever giving anything back to the world.

But then I remember readers: those wonderful people who accept my thoughts, who even pay to read them, and who listen with their hearts. People who may be helped in a very real way by something a thinker wrote down, or who just get to escape reality for a while because of a story that manages to entertain. This is what keeps me sane: I do contribute, just not in my home town. To the people in my village, I may forever be the recluse who spends all her time on a computer, but to someone at the opposite side of the world, my thoughts may almost take on corporeal form. Those people, then, are my true colleagues. I work with them to create something unique that only exists because of me and my readers.

Because of this, my breath will not be wasted. I will have contributed in my small way, and that’s all I can ask for.

A tourist in gay Paris

I sometimes worry about the kind of stories I write. Specifically, about being a “tourist”. About taking the experiences of a group I don’t belong to, and exploiting them for my own purposes – for entertainment, for laughs and tears, for therapy.

Yes, therapy. Special confession just for you: that’s one reason why I’m writing in the M/M genre. I want to appropriate someone else’s struggle and filter it through my own lens.

Why?

Why can’t I just write about my own experience, using characters who resemble me?

Well, writing what you know – what you really know, ie exactly what happened to you – isn’t always such a great idea. Someone once said that every author needs to vomit up at least one terrible autobiography before they can write for real, and for me that’s beyond true. Actually, I had to write three. Thankfully, no one but my sisters have read them, because this was before the advent of self-publishing. I shudder to think of my twenty-year-old self clicking that Publish button and setting her awful stories lose on the world. I’m glad I kept them to myself and learned to write books that conveyed a message through a life experience that wasn’t my own. It freed me to talk about universal problems, about feelings we all have, as opposed to my own myopic experience.

But from there to writing gay characters? You may well ask. I’m not entirely sure myself why I do it. But somewhere at the heart of my writing is the constant struggle to be who you are in a world that sort of accepts it, but not really, and that’s smack bang in the solar plexus of what I want to talk about. If I really tried, I might be able to convey it with straight, cis female main characters who don’t fit in, but I don’t. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it simply feels too close to home – and, paradoxically, too distant.

Let me explain. I’ve noticed that when I write stories that feel close to my heart, I tend to write them in third person POV, as if I’m trying to keep them at arm’s length. In contrast, the wild flights of fancy are often in first person POV, because they’re not as threatening. For example, I’m not a vampire, or the victim of viral RPS fanfic, so I wrote those stories in first person POV. In contrast, my Pax books require that I meticulously dissect my entire heart with a really sharp knife, and I sort of can’t do that unless I push the characters into third person quasi-anonymity.

In the same way, maybe I can write about things that really mean something to me – my upcoming novel about eating disorders is a prime example – by adding a few degrees of separation. Artists lie to tell the truth, after all, and maybe the truer the tale, the more elaborate the lie must be. Maybe by telling the story of a male bulimic, I can shed new light on a disease that’s traditionally femininely coded.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that I find writing female characters limiting is precisely the reason I should write them. Why take a traditionally feminine problem and give it to a man, after all? Doesn’t that erase the feminine experience and further promote a phallocentric worldview – isn’t it somehow appropriation by proxy?

On the other hand, the male experience of femininely coded diseases is perhaps even more invisible, and therefore important to give voice to. Maybe the very act of flouting the feminine coding can help us view the world as more diverse?

I don’t know. This may all be hogwash. But there is a kind of freedom involved in inhabiting someone else’s body and speaking in their voice. Shakespeare’s comic heroines disguised themselves as men to be able to say and do things they otherwise couldn’t, and so do I. In a way, it’s what writers do all the time. I’m not a vampire, but I use them to tell a story. I’m not gay, but I use gay characters to tell a story. Every writer is a tourist, unless they only publish their memoirs. We enter someone else’s mind and paint the world using their brushes and colours. Of course, our own colours seep through from time to time, but still, we attempt to give voice to people/characters who might not speak if we didn’t hand them the mic.

So yes, I am appropriating, but so was Dostoyevsky when he wrote about Anna Karenina. And I refuse to be a worse author than him! ;)

“Where do your ideas come from?”

A few minutes of blathering to basically say, “I don’t know.”

The chance of a lifetime or the beginning of the end?

What happens in Carthage doesn’t stay in Carthage.

Pax IV – Cutting Edge, scheduled release March 2016.

Why you may not be able to apologize to a victim of bullying

Sticking my neck out with a video about MIchael Vaughan and why Simon (or anyone else for that matter) may not be able to apologize to him for being assholes in school.